FAA Confirms 737 MAX 10 Certification Delay, Boeing Shares Drop Nearly 7%

Since Boeing disclosed the vertical-navigation software glitch on Saturday, September 26, and the FAA opened a safety review, the agency has now made the delay official. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford told reporters Monday at an event near Reagan Washington National Airport that the 737 MAX 10 will not be certified until regulators determine whether the bug is a safety-of-flight issue.

"We haven't concluded whether this is a safety-of-flight issue or not, but we will be delaying the 10 ... until we're satisfied that we don't have an issue here," Bedford said, according to CNBC. He declined to put a timeline on it.

Boeing shares closed down 6.9% Monday, according to CTV News, with TradingView reporting an intraday drop as high as 6.8% and ZeroHedge putting the initial swing at 6.1% before losses extended through the afternoon. CNBC reported the stock shed nearly 7% by the close.

What the bug actually does

The glitch involves software, supplied by GE Aerospace, that can cut off automated vertical-navigation guidance during a go-around, the maneuver where a pilot aborts a landing and climbs back up to try again, according to CTV News and CNBC. Bedford said Boeing had fixed a prior version of the bug but "unexpectedly introduced a new bug" in the process.

Bedford drew a distinction between this issue and the flight-control system implicated in the 2018 and 2019 MAX 8 crashes. "The pilots remain in control of the airliner, train for these scenarios," he said. "The issue that we're looking at right now is the workload component."

CTV News reported the FAA plans to convene a Corrective Action Review Board, though two sources told Reuters that board isn't likely to meet before next week at the earliest. Bedford floated the possibility that GE Aerospace could move fast given the scrutiny, saying a fix could land in "weeks, days, months? I don't know."

Airlines push back on urgency

WestJet, the Calgary-based carrier that operates the affected software, said Monday it has not experienced any in-service events tied to the issue, according to Ground News' aggregation of Reuters wire coverage. "We have standard operating procedures and training to mitigate this type of event," the airline said in a statement.

Three WestJet 737 MAX pilots, speaking anonymously to Reuters, said they weren't aware of any problems with the software during missed approaches, which they described as a rare procedure. Alaska Airlines and United Airlines both said none of their current aircraft run the affected software, and United confirmed it is not accepting new deliveries with it, per CTV News.

Pilots who actually fly the software say it hasn't caused a real-world problem, and the FAA administrator himself says the pilots never lose control of the aircraft. The sourced record supports a reading that this delay is regulatory caution working as designed rather than evidence of a hidden crisis.

At the same time, the bug adds to a pattern. The FAA certified the smaller 737 MAX 7 last month with the newest version of this same software, meaning the same glitch is now under evaluation on jets already headed to customers like Southwest Airlines, CNBC reported. It isn't clear yet how that affects those deliveries.

A second, separate problem

The software delay landed the same weekend as an unrelated FAA airworthiness directive, issued Saturday, requiring inspections on roughly 471 in-service 737 MAX aircraft for potential fuselage cracks at a structural component called the bear strap, which supports the fuselage around exit doors, according to Ground News. Boeing said it is working with airlines and regulators and that the inspection protocol is designed to catch cracks before they reach critical size. The two issues are being reported alongside each other but are mechanically unrelated: one is a software workload problem in a go-around scenario, the other is a structural inspection mandate borrowed from earlier 737 Next Generation protocols.

What's actually at stake for Boeing

The MAX 10 has more than 1,500 orders on the books and was originally supposed to start deliveries in 2020, according to CNBC. Certification had been widely expected as soon as October, per CTV News, before this delay. CEO Kelly Ortberg told investors earlier this month approval was coming "very soon."

ZeroHedge framed the story around Ortberg's two-year tenure and Boeing's stock slide, which is accurate as far as it goes but skips the WestJet and pilot pushback that Reuters and CTV News carried. Neither Boeing nor GE Aerospace has given a public timeline for the fix. The Corrective Action Review Board's findings, whenever they land, will determine whether this costs Boeing weeks or months on its most-ordered narrowbody variant.